A designer using a computer aided design (CAD) computational system will typically approach the design of a free form geometric object (such as a surface) by first specifying prominent and/or necessary subportions of the geometric object through which the object is constrained to pass. Subsequently, a process is activated for generating the geometric object that conforms to the constraining subportions provided. In particular, such subportions may be points, curves, surfaces and/or higher dimensional geometric objects. For example, a designer that designs a surface may construct and position a plurality of curves through which the intended surface must pass (each such curve also being denoted herein as a “feature line” or “feature curve”). Thus, the intended surface is, in general, expected to have geometric characteristics (such as differentiability and curvature) that, substantially, only change to the extent necessary in order to satisfy the constraints placed upon the surface by the plurality of curves. That is, the designer expects the generated surface to be what is typically referred to as “fair” by those skilled in the art. Thus, the designer typically constructs such feature curves and positions them where the intended surface is likely to change its geometric shape in a way that cannot be easily interpolated from other subportions of the surface already designed.
As a more specific example, when designing containers such as bottles, an intended exterior surface of a bottle may be initially specified by subportions such as: (a) feature curves positioned in high curvature portions of the bottle surface, and (b) surface subareas having particular geometric characteristics such as having a shape or contour upon which a bottle label can be smoothly applied. Thus, the intention of a bottle surface designer is to construct a bottle design that satisfies his/her input constraints and that is also fair. Moreover, the designer may desire to generate holes for handles, as well as, e.g., ergonomic bottle grips by deforming various portions of the bottle surface and still have the bottle surface fair.
There has heretofore, however, been no CAD system wherein a designer (or more generally, user) of geometric objects can easily and efficiently express his/her design intent by inputting constraints and having the resulting geometric object be fair. That is, the designer/user may encounter lengthy delays due to substantial computational overhead and/or the designer/user may be confronted with non-intuitive geometric object definition and deformation techniques that require substantial experience to effectively use. For example, many prior art CAD systems provide techniques for allowing surfaces to be designed and/or deformed by defining and/or manipulating designated points denoted as “control points.” However, such techniques can be computationally expensive, non-intuitive, and incapable of easily deforming more than a local area of the surface associated with such a control point. Additionally, some prior art CAD systems provide techniques for defining and/or deforming surfaces via certain individually designated control vectors. That is, the direction of these vectors may be used to define the shape or contour of an associated surface. However, a designer's intent may not easily correspond to a surface design technique using such control vectors since each of the control vectors typically corresponds to only a single point of the surface isolated from other surface points having corresponding control vectors. Thus, such techniques are, at most, only able to deform an area of the surface local to such points having corresponding control vectors.
Additionally, such prior art CAD systems may also have difficulties in precisely performing blending and trimming operations. For example, two geometric objects intended to abut one another along a common boundary may not be within a sufficient tolerance to one another at the boundary. That is, there may be sufficiently large gaps between the geometric objects that the boundary may not be considered “water tight,” which may be problematic in certain machining operations and other operations like Boolean operations on solids.
Accordingly, it would be very desirable to have a CAD system that includes one or more geometric design techniques for allowing CAD designers/users to more easily, efficiently and precisely design geometric objects. Further, it would be desirable to have such a system and/or computational techniques for graphically displaying geometric objects, wherein there is greater user control over the defining and/or deforming of computational geometric objects, and in particular, more intuitive global control over the shape or contour of computationally designed geometric objects.